Tuesday, December 08, 2009

TJX Hacker to Plead Guilty to Heartland Breach

Admitted TJX intruder Albert Gonzalez has entered into a plea agreement on charges that he hacked into Heartland Payment Systems, Hannaford Brothers, 7-Eleven and two other unnamed national retailers.

The revelation comes in a filing made by Gonzalez’s attorney in U.S. District Court in New Jersey, where the Heartland charges were filed in August.

A federal judge on Tuesday officially transferred the New Jersey case to Massachusetts, where Gonzalez is seeking to merge it with two other cases in which he’s already pleaded guilty.

Gonzalez, a former Secret Service informant known by the online nicks “segvec” and “Cumbajohnny,” was charged in New Jersey in August, along with two unnamed Russian hackers. They were accused of stealing more than 130 million debit and credit cards from card-processing company Heartland and the other target companies.